Parthogenesis

Parthenogenetic Reproduction of Rabbits

Scientific experiment claims that by certain mechanical or chemical means and reactions an animal, say a rabbit, can give birth to apparently normal young without the usual mating process. Is this possible from the Theosophical viewpoint? That is, with our knowledge of Nature's processes of reproduction during earlier Races, could this scientific method be a forced throw-back to such times, or again a forced push-forward to future times? I quote the following report given in the LOS ANGELES TIMES of November 23, 1941, to make my question clearer, and would much appreciate your comment.

Philadelphia, Nov. 22 (AP) A small bag of ice cubes from the refrigerator, placed on the side of a rabbit for an hour and a half, sometimes causes conception, the American Philosophical Society was told today by Dr. Herbert Shapiro of Hahnemann Medical College, Philadelphia.
After Dr. Shapiro had finished, the chairman of the meeting, Dr. Edwin G. Conklin, Princeton University biologist, said:
"We have just listened to what really may be the beginning of a most important result. I am sure it would greatly interest theologians. Possibly we are on the way to see the explanation of a miracle."
The ice treatment, Dr. Shapiro said, has caused virgin conception in a number of rabbits. The seeming miracle is only occasional. None of these first rabbits in which conception took place was allowed to live. But Dr. Shapiro said some later will be allowed to go on to the point of giving birth to the young, if they do. All the scientific evidence points to success when this is tried, he explained. There is now living one rabbit, born in January this year, whose daddy was a tube of ice water, inserted by surgical operation into the abdomen to chill the mother's unfertilized ova, or eggs, for a few minutes. This ice water rabbit is a female, perfectly normal, and already has had two litters of young by normal reproduction. Those ice water experiments were made by Drs. Shapiro and Gregory Pincus.
In addition there are also today, in this country, three living rabbits whose fathers were merely concentrated salt. This salt technique was the first scientifically recorded virgin birth of mammals, and the ova were fertilized by a surgical operation which exposed them to the salt.
Work done by other scientists and not mentioned today raises the question of the possibility of human conception under similar circumstances. Surgeons in Philadelphia have found that human ova, obtained during operations, take the first steps of conception when exposed to chemical solutions.

The question is of course intricate, and not the kind of thing that can be answered in a short sentence, as the entire history and generation of the human race in this Round is really involved in or bears upon the alleged reproduction processes of non-impregnated females among the animals.

Abstractly, I see nothing impossible in such reproduction, which only by courtesy ever could be called Virgin Conception, for Virgin Conception in Christian theology means only one thing, the unique instance in eternity(!) of the Jewish maiden Mary becoming a mother through the incarnation of the Third Person of the Trinity. I doubt if Christian theologians would like to apply this theological conception to the parthenogenetic reproduction of rabbits! It is of course not virgin birth, though it is or abstractly could be a form of biologic parthenogenesis.

Abstractly, I say, parthenogenesis is not impossible. In fact, unless I have forgotten all the biology I once knew, it is occasionally still found in the animal kingdom, females reproducing young from, within themselves. This was once a common mode of reproduction of the human kingdom during the First Race, during the Second Race, and during about half of the Third Root-Race, although the methods employed in these two and a half Races changed with evolution's procedures and work.

I have often said that the present sex condition in mankind, and even in animals, is but a passing phase, and will be succeeded in due course of time by another method, in my own opinion a partial return to hermaphroditism or androgyny, to be followed again by something still less suggestive of sex; and it is obvious that these methods will be preceded in the human kingdom's evolutionary history by facts casting their shadows before, which will be looked upon at first as playthings of nature, lusus naturae, and then become universal; and the present system will be looked upon as a rapidly dying out reproduction-method of degenerates, until it disappears. The animals, although dying out as a kingdom, will reflect likewise and copy more or less what the human kingdom goes through, passes through, evolves into.

Now then, our teaching regarding reproduction is the teaching of the norm, the rule, the regular thing, but with many hints or allusions to coming changes, and with a finger pointing into the historic or pre-historic past. The cases of these rabbits, non-impregnated females, producing fertile young because of cold applied locally to the female's reproductive organs, or salt applied by a surgical operation to the same organ, can be explained in various ways, and until I were thoroughly acquainted with all the details, it would be partly guess-work on my part to try to state what actually did occur, although I have a clear enough suspicion of what could happen, which I think actually did happen, if this newspaper report can be accepted as authentic, and not just some newspaper reporter's yarn about something which indeed took place, but which the reporter, being no biologist, either did not properly understand, or embroidered.

I have a notion, therefore, that what took place was something like this: the means employed by these experimenters temporarily paralysed or perhaps dislocated what we might call the female or feminine current of kama, and threw the generative organ of the female, or rather the ova, back to a condition resembling, if not identical with, the hermaphroditism of the early Third Race. Then the ova would follow the line of least resistance, and there being always in every human or animal of our day a double sex in each, in women the male being recessive and the female dominant, and in the male the male element dominant and the female current recessive, the ova in such cases, or an ovum in such case, would develop from the double current innate in the mother rabbit, and thus produce offspring pretty much as the hermaphrodites did towards the middle of the Third Root-Race. Or indeed the process might more nearly have resembled that of the Second Root-Race.

But of course I can only assume and search here, as I do not know all the facts. But I know what must have taken place in a general way. Such a female mother, if left alone and not further interfered with or meddled with, like those creatures who meddled with the human eggs in the early Third, would probably not reproduce again except in the usual way, or by again being interfered with by human experimenters.

Thus I discern nothing impossible in this report, but having only end results and not the full story, I can only know what must have taken place; but just which aspect I cannot say. But I think the experiment reported in the clipping reduced the female rabbit's ova to about the condition of the human ova towards the early or middle Third Root-Race.

Could such meddling or interfering or experimenting produce the same results on human females?

I don't see why not. But the subject to me is repulsive, and I think rather dangerous. It is infinitely better to leave these things to the laws of nature as we find them. It is evident that the dhyan-chohanic 'fluid,' which merely means the fluid emanating from the reincarnating ego, is as present in a human or animal female, as it is present in a human male. But nature today follows present procedures automatically, and will only change them and revert to pre-history when her courses are stopped or interfered with. If the stoppage is heavy, nothing will result. If the stoppage is a mere diversion, something will happen. Reversion will take place in such instances. Heaven knows what such offspring will be or would become! Personally I think it would be greatly disadvantaged, because produced abnormally, and out of nature's present rule. I think such experiments are little short of black magic, but what do scientists know of magic, either white or black? Unable themselves to explain, they think it is enough just to experiment like the schoolboy in the chemical laboratory.

Therefore do not confuse the norm as nature now has it, and which our Theosophical teaching has tried to illustrate, with the abnormal experimentations which, because abnormal reversions but outlived, are now dead evolutionary stages.